Today Alex Rodriguez’s legal team amended the lawsuit A-Rod filed last month. No legal changes. The biggest factual changes are the inclusion of allegations surrounding Bud Selig’s failure to testify at the arbitration. From the Daily News:

They claim the baseball commissioner’s “cowardly stance” is consistent with his highly inappropriate past conduct – and as proof, they included a photo of Selig posing with a young fan wearing a Cincinnati Reds hat and an “A-Roid” T-shirt. “One cannot imagine the commissioner of any other professional sport – or indeed the CEO of any business – doing something similar with respect to one of his or her players or employees,” Team A-Rod said in the papers filed in Manhattan federal court.

Like so much of the original lawsuit and the public relations strategy Team A-Rod has taken since this drama began, this is all calculated to put Major League Baseball in a bad light and to try to make it appear as if A-Rod never had a chance at a fair hearing, thereby justifying their case being heard in court rather than dismissed as redundant. I’m dubious, however, about its legal merit or how successful it’ll be. It’s a lot of bomb-throwing.

The Daily News — which has spent most of the past decade slamming A-Rod one way or another — certainly thinks it lacks merit. So much so that they took a swipe at one of the people cited in the A-Rod complaint:

The Oakland Athletics ballpark saga has dragged on for years and years and years. They’ve considered San Jose, Fremont and at least three locations in Oakland as potential new ballpark sites. The whole process has lasted almost as long as the Braves and Rangers played in their old parks before building new ones.

In the past several months the Athletics’ “stay in Oakland” plan has gained momentum. At one point the club thought it had an agreement to build a new place near Peralta/Laney College in downtown Oakland. There have been hiccups with that, so two other sites — Howard Terminal, favored by city officials — and the current Oakland Coliseum site have remained in play. There are pros and cons to each of these sites, as we have discussed in the past.

One consideration not mentioned before was mentioned by team president David Kaval yesterday: sea level rise due to climate change. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Kaval mentioned twice that the Howard Terminal site would have to take into account sea-level rise and transportation concerns — and he said there have been conversations with the city and county and the Joint Powers Authority about developing the Coliseum site.

The Howard Terminal/Jack London Square area of Oakland has been identified as susceptible to dramatically increased flooding as a result of projected sea level rise due to climate change. On the other side of the bay both the San Francisco Giants and Golden State Warriors have had to consider sea level rise in their stadium/arena development plans. Now it’s the Athletics’ turn.

Fifteen of Major League Baseball’s 30 teams play in coastal areas and another five of them play near the Great Lakes. While some of our politicians don’t seem terribly concerned about it all, people and organizations who will have skin the game 10, 20 and 50 years from now, like the Oakland Athletics, are taking it into account.